SOURCE: Jones, Thom, and Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver. “Thom Jones: A Way of Feeling Better.” In Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers, edited by Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver, pp. 112-27. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

In the following interview, Jones discusses his life and his writing and how the former influences the latter.

Though he attended the Iowa Writers Workshop in the early 1970s, Thom Jones worked only sporadically as a fiction writer for the next twenty years. Like Ad Magic, one of his recurring characters, he wrote advertising copy and traveled in Africa and India, designing campaigns for hunger relief. Later he was a journalist, reporting on the Washington state legislature. When budget cuts cost him that job, he wrote a novel (unpublished) and collected unemployment. Then he worked for eleven years as a janitor at the high school in Lacey, Washington, where...